The UN refugee agency is appealing to the Congolese government to send more troops to protect civilians in Orientale Province in the northeastern corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Ugandan rebel Lord's Resistance Army massacred hundreds of civilians in the area over the Christmas period.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today strongly condemned the “appalling atrocities” reportedly committed by the Ugandan rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and southern Sudan, and demanded that they respect all rules of international humanitarian law.

According to the reports, the rebels, fleeing a joint military operation by the DRC, Uganda and Southern Sudan to flush them out of a remote national park in north-eastern DRC, committed grave violations of human rights against civilians in Faradje, 120 kilometres east of Dungu, killing the villagers, plundering and destroying houses.

The Security Council today told United Nations peacekeepers in strife-torn eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to prioritize the protection of civilians, including humanitarian personnel, as the number of attacks on aid workers, some of them deadly, passed 100 since the start of 2008.

The Ugandan military said on Thursday that it is deploying more troops in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) to beef up an ongoing offensive against the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) today said it is very concerned about reports that rebels are putting pressure on those displaced by the deadly fighting in the far east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to return to their villages.

Set to kick off on Monday, the talks will be facilitated by Olusegun Obasanjo, the Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on the Great Lakes Region and former Nigerian president, and Benjamin Mkapa, representing the African Union (AU) and the International Conference on the Great Lakes (ICGLR), who is also the former president of Tanzania.

A bill introduced by U.S. Senator Barack Obama, in his first year in the Senate, supports the Congolese government position that the presence of Rwandan Hutu militias (FLDR) and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in eastern Congo is being used as a "pretext" by Rwanda and Uganda to continue their "interference" in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The top United Nations envoy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) today asked for additional peacekeepers beyond the nearly 19,000 uniformed personnel already there to prevent the vast country from slipping back into "horrendous" conflict.